Brothel Raids Raise Slavery Fears

Women Forced Into Sex Trade, Police Suspect

Fort Pierce — Last week's raid on five Fort Pierce brothels bears significant, and graphic, similarities to a prostitution case in the city in 1998 that led to convictions on federal slavery charges.

Fort Pierce police continue to suggest that slavery might have been involved now, too, but stop short of stating it as fact.

At a news conference Monday announcing the arrest of a boy, five women and seven men on charges of "living off the earnings of prostitution," Police Chief Eugene Savage said the women told investigators that they were prostitutes "of their own free will" and getting paid for their services.

But Savage said that officials are skeptical and think the women could have been forced to prostitute themselves in what he said may be "a slave-type arrangement."

"They're all in this country illegally," he said, "and people can be compelled to do a lot of things as a ticket out of their home countries."

All of the women are natives of the Dominican Republic.

The two main factors that constitute human trafficking are forced labor and restricted freedom, said Suzanne Quinn, a program manager with the Florida Freedom Partnership in Miami.

It's not unusual for women who have been held against their will to initially lie to police, then come forward after months of detention, Quinn said.

"[The brothel operators] ingrain in [the women] that the police are bad," she said. "They do it to coerce them into saying what they want them to say."

Police Detective Christopher Newman is hesitant to use the word "slavery" to describe the women's condition.

"They definitely had people preying on them, taking advantage of their situation," he said. "These women, all but one of them came to this country illegally. They're trying to survive, trying to make ends meet; and they don't think they can do it. They get sucked into this lifestyle."

That lifestyle included living in run-down houses with very little furniture other than mattresses on the floor where, Newman said, the women slept and "did their business."

A sheet dividing one bedroom in the house was all the privacy afforded one prostitute and her clients: The house doorman stood on the other side.

Newman said he believes the women's statements that they were paid for their services.

The women were moved every week among several brothels that police think make up a ring extending throughout the state and perhaps beyond.

Quinn said that fits the profile of human-trafficking cases involving prostitution: keeping women from getting familiar with their surroundings and not allowing them to move freely.